The president is more popular than he's been for a long time. The president is more popular than a lot of presidents ever have been. You can attribute it to a lingering bounce from his re-election. You can attribute it to a newer bounce from his vigorous defense of himself and his ideas in his inaugural address. It is probably both of those things. But I think the primary reason that the president's numbers are heading into puppies-and-fluffy-bunnies territory lies in his ongoing campaign -- by means both explicit and implicit -- to delegitimize the Republican party as a credible opposition party. For at least 20 years, the Republicans have tolerated within themselves positions and candidates far from the mainstream of our politics. The reason they were able to do this and still prosper was that they never were forced to pay a price for it. Either they were able to paper it over, or the Democrats declined to make an issue of if because of their pathetic desire to break off a corner of the crazy and/or the greedy for themselves. (Over that same stretch of time, the Democrats delegitimized themselves as an opposition, which is a different problem entirely.) The election of Barack Hussein Obama threw the Republicans -- and the raging conservative Id that is the only intellectual energy the Republicans have -- completely over the edge. It wasn't just the mainstreaming of the birther crap. It wasn't just the rise of the Tea Party, a modern New Media marriage of old-fashioned nativism and crackpot populism straight out of Father Coughlin. (Nothing is new. Honest.) It was that the Republican party establishment was overwhelmed by the abandoned wrath aimed at a very centrist Democratic president and the wrath burned out the party's impulse control.

And the president, seeing this, shrewdly found a way to lock the Republicans inside their own monkeyhouse while he went about trying to govern the country. You can see it now as Republicans try to gut each other, and screech wildly, and pass laws in the states guaranteeing their further marginalization nationally, while the president gets credit for doggedly going about the business of doing his job. The more dogged he was, the more hysterical they became. Pretty soon, they looked less like an opposition party than they did a pack of vandals. Right now, there literally is nothing proceeding from the Republican party in Congress to which any serious person should pay any mind.

His inaugural address aside, the president is not "more liberal" than he was on January 19. He's still a cautious centrist with a jones for a purely functional view of government. But the one thing he is very good at is forcing the country to look honestly at the politics through which the country has chosen to govern itself. He has forced the issues. He has made the country confront the ignorance, and the lassitude, and the tolerance for the stupid -- and, hell, the tolerance for the intolerant -- that it has allowed to have pride of place in our political debate simply because it too often served to win elections. This is what the Obama presidency has become. It's the detox ward of politics. It's the world's most elaborate intervention.

He has made a clearance now. The approval ratings show that vividly. The question now is what he will do with it. (Turn down the Keystone XL pipeline, I would say.) He must recognize that the political calculus has changed. The Republicans can still stymie him, and they can still rail against him, and they still can unleash the dark matter of anonymous slander and unaccountable corporate money. They can make a wreckage out of things in the states. But there is no political advantage to be gained from that any more. The more they obstruct, the less popular they become. Vandalism is no longer artistic. They have defined themselves in that way and, in doing so, they have done him an incalculable political favor. If there is a liberal in him, and I admit that's still a matter of no little conjecture, he can let that person emerge and, by comparison to the forces arrayed against him, that inner liberal will look reasonable. In him, if he's very good at his job, liberalism can become the default pragmatism in our politics. It can be made logical again, and wise, and it is possible that the political center will move back towards the middle once again. It's been away for a long time.